Recently, with rapid proliferation of network technology, distributed systems based on it have been increasingly employed and supplied by more and more vendors. Companies, which build information systems and utilize various data in electronic form to realize efficient operations, have been increased. However, in many cases, they employ independent systems dedicated to particular operations. Therefore, in promoting efficient operations among several sections of a company or cooperative work with other companies, various problems arise, including data sharing among companies, interconnection of systems, and policy for system replacement of each company. To address these problems, distributed object-oriented technology draws attention. This distributed object-oriented technology provides a mechanism, through which objects or function units are managed and executed in a distributed system.
The United States Object Management Group, an organization for standardization of object-oriented technology has a major purpose to interconnect distributed object products provided by different suppliers (vendors), and has established a specification, Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The CORBA provides a framework for clients to call objects (distributed objects) residing in a network. In CORBA, common specifications for Object Request Broker (ORB), which is middle-ware to mediate communications between server objects and client applications on various machines in a distributed object environment, are provided.
Patent specifications related to the CORBA include Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2000-224262 and No. 10-187637. The Application No. 2000-224262 describes a technique for flexibly accommodating various types of management objects and protocols in each device constituting a communication network to be managed. The technique includes an object that manages several objects in the same ORB named as an information management object (IMO) and a plurality of CORBA objects (application objects) systematically managed by the IMO.
In view of CORBA architecture, a plurality of CORBA naming services defined as a CORBA service can independently exist. Therefore, a client, who wants to access a desired CORBA object, does not know which naming service is to be accessed. Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 10-187637 discloses a technique for making each component of the naming services distributed and making it appear fictionally as a naming service if several naming services are available to provide a more flexible naming service.
Conventionally, vendors providing CORBA products interpret CORBA specifications by themselves and make implementations based on their interpretation and deliver their products as CORBA products in accordance with CORBA specifications. However, if a test is made for connection between CORBA products developed in accordance with CORBA specifications, it may fail because of different interpretations of CORBA specifications by different vendors, incomplete runtime module implementation for CORBA-IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol) communications in ORB, or ORB implementation that's unique to each vendor.
Also, since programs may be changed for each upgrade or modification of products after a successful connection, tests for interconnection between products would be required again. Furthermore, even if a server ORB supports excellent functions, dynamic recognition by clients is not provided in the conventional CORBA-IIOP communications environment, such that communication capabilities of the entire system may not be optimized.
In addition, the above Published Unexamined Patent Applications No. 2000-224262 and No. 1998-187637 do not disclose any techniques for facilitating communications between different types or versions of ORBs, and do not present a solution for the problems mentioned above.
The present invention solves the technical problems described above. It is therefore an object of the present invention to improve reliability and communication efficiency in interconnection in communications between ORBs of products having different specifications.